Predictions made by Ray Kurzweil

American author, inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has become well known for his predictions about artificial intelligence and the human species, mainly concerning the technological singularity. He predicts that artificial intelligence would outsmart the human brain in computational capabilities by mid-21st century. His first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in 1990, put forth his theories on the results of the increasing use of technology and predicted the explosive growth in the internet, among other predictions. Later works, 1999's The Age of Spiritual Machines and 2005's The Singularity is Near outlined other theories including the rise of clouds of nano-robots (nanobots) called foglets and the development of Human Body 2.0 and 3.0, whereby nanotechnology is incorporated into many internal organs.
Accuracy of predictions
The Age of Intelligent Machines
Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. It forecast the demise of the already crumbling Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. In 2005, Mikhail Gorbachev told Kurzweil that emerging decentralized electronic communication "was a big factor" for fostering democracy in the Soviet Union.
Kurzweil extrapolated the performance of chess software to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament.
Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was often unreliable outside academic, military, corporate and other heavily invested settings, difficult for non-technical users to use, and mostly lacking a broad range of content. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil correctly foresaw that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.
The Age of Spiritual Machines
In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil believes the world will experience over the next century. Titled "To Face the Future", the section is divided into four chapters respectively named "2009", "2019", "2029", and "2099". For every chapter, Kurzweil issues predictions about what life and technology will be like in that year.
Kurzweil restated his earlier prediction from The Age of Intelligent Machines regarding the advent of pocket-sized, cheap, text-to-speech converters for the blind by 2009. The was introduced in 2005 at a price of $3,495. The device was portable, but not the cheap, pocket-sized device of the prediction. By 2008, a software version for the (pocket-sized) Nokia N82 smartphone was available for $1,595. A version for iOS phones was released for $99 in 2014 and Android for $75 in 2015.
The Singularity Is Near
While this book focuses on the future of technology and the human race as The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines did, Kurzweil makes very few concrete, short-term predictions in The Singularity Is Near, though longer-term visions abound.
Kurzweil predicted that, in 2005, supercomputers with the computational capacities to simulate protein folding will be introduced. In 2010, a supercomputer simulated protein folding for a very small protein at an atomic level over a period of a millisecond. The protein folded and unfolded, with the results closely matching experimental data. In 2020, DeepMind's AlphaFold AI was recognized "as a solution to this grand challenge" by the organizers of the biyearly protein structure prediction contest CASP.
Other sources
In an October 2002 article published on his website, Kurzweil stated that "Deep Fritz-like chess programs running on ordinary personal computers will routinely defeat all humans later in this decade." Deep Fritz is a computer chess program—generally considered superior to the older Deep Blue — that has defeated or tied a number of human chess masters and opposing chess programs. Due to advances in personal computer performance, the Deep Fritz program can now run on ordinary personal computers, and different versions of it are available for purchase. In September 2002, Chessmaster 9000, a widely available chess playing game from Ubisoft, defeated the then U.S. Chess Champion and International Grandmaster Larry Christiansen in a four-game match. In 2006 reigning World Champion Vladimir Kramnik was defeated 4:2 by Deep Fritz, running on a multiprocessor personal computer.
Ray Kurzweil's response
According to Ray Kurzweil, 90 out of 108 predictions he made were entirely correct by the end of 2009. Kurzweil later released a more detailed analysis of the accuracy of his predictions up to 2009, arguing that most were correct.
Future predictions
The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)
Late 20th century
*Predicts that he and his company will create a "voice-activated typewriter" by 1995.
* By 1999 "consumers will be able to sit down at their home computers and design their own clothes to their own precise measurements and style requirements using friendly, computer-assisted design software".
Early 2000s
*Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.
*Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words.
*Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk.
*Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority.
*"Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads.
* "Lifetime patient records and histories will be maintained in nationally (or internationally) coordinated data banks". Not an accurate prediction.
*Most text will be created using speech recognition technology.
*Digital products such as books, songs, games, movies and software are typically acquired as files via a wireless network and have no physical object associated with them.
*Though not yet ubiquitous, many households have one or more robots that perform some type of housekeeping.
*People often play music alongside digital musicians. (In "How My Predictions Are Faring" written in 2010, and "Ray Kurzweil Defends His 2009 Predictions" written in 2012 Kurzweil cited Guitar Hero and Apple's Magic GarageBand Jam as two examples.) (Wayback Machin<s></s>e)
*"Within 20 years we will...have models and simulations of all several hundred regions of the brain, including the cerebral cortex...and we'll have the secrets of human intelligence...and then machines will operate at human levels." (9:40)
*In the 2020s, it will be possible to send machines into human brains through capillaries, allowing direct amplification of human intelligence. (16:50)
*In 25 years, there will be advanced nanobots that can go inside human bodies and keep them healthy. (19:30)
*Nanobots will be "the size of red blood cells." While a nanobot's subcomponents would be under 100 nm long, the overall size of a nanobot could be measured in micrometers (µm). (19:50)
*A Turing Test should go on for "hours." By 2029, AIs that pass the Turing Test will have "the equivalent of human intelligence." (27:30)
*By the early 2030s, machines will persuasively display human emotions, human-level intelligence, and will claim to be conscious. (36:00)
*"We will get to full-scale molecular nanotechnology in about 20 years." Moore's Second Law will be negated by self-organizing computer chips. (42:00)
*Intel's "roadmap" shows that computer chips will have 4 nm features by 2020. (43:30)
*We will switch from 2D to computer 3D chips before Moore's Law stops. The exponentially improving cost-performance of computation will thus have no interruption. (45:00)
*In the early 2010s, cell phones will commonly offer speech-to-text transcription capabilities and language translation capabilities. (48:30)
*VR/AR glasses that project images onto wearers' retinas will be common in the early 2010s. It will become "routine technology" by the end of that decade. (52:00)
*Kurzweil believes the first machine to pass the Turing Test will be his VR avatar/chatbot "Ramona." (58:30)
*Nanobots in people's brains will enable full-immersion virtual reality in "20 years or so." (1:07:50)
*In 15 years, we will be able to reprogram our biology just as we program computers today. (1:36:00)
*In 25 years, we will have advanced nanobots that can enter our bodies and fix our cells, keeping us healthy. (1:37:00)
*In 15 years, we will hit life extension escape velocity. It will apply to people of all ages, including old people. (1:40:00)
*In about a century, humans will saturate their part of the universe with intelligence. Later, humans will saturate the whole universe. (2:16:30)
*Religious fundamentalists are unlikely to reverse technological and social progress. (2:25:00)
*Microsoft and Google will still be successful companies in 15 years. (2:31:00)
*In 20 years, "flying devices will be personalized using nanotechnology and they'll fly themselves." Unclear whether this refers to flying cars. (2:40:00)
*In 15-20 years, humans will be able to use biotechnology to "reprogram" themselves so that cancer, heart disease and other serious diseases become manageable conditions and not fatal ones. It is even possible those diseases will be cured. The same technology will let bioterrorists create newer, deadly pathogens. (2:53:00)
*Advanced future technologies will not end human conflict, but the 21st century will probably be less warlike than the 20th century. (2:57:00)
Kurzweil has said that by 2014, humanity will reach a "tipping point" where the cost-per-watt from solar energy is cheaper than from coal and oil: By capturing only 0.03 percent of the sun's energy that falls on Earth, humanity could meet virtually all of its projected energy needs up to 2030 (thirty trillion watts); this will be capable through with extremely inexpensive, lightweight, and efficient nano-engineered solar panels together with nano-fuel cells to store and distribute the captured energy. Kurzweil believes, by the end of the 2020s, humans will be able to completely replace fossil fuels.
Kurzweil has said that by the 2030s, people will be able to send nano-bots into their brains through their capillaries. The nano-bots will take up positions in close physical proximity to each interneuronal connection coming from each physical sense and cause the firing of neurons to result in full-immersion virtual reality, similar to the way psychedelic drugs alter consciousness. The nano-bots will also allow people to "connect their neocortex to the cloud". This technology is based on “neuron transistors” developed by scientists at the Max Planck Institute that can control the firing of neurons.
Kurzweil said the following in a November 2007 Computerworld interview:
*Speech-to-speech translation features will be available in cell phones in either 2009 or 2010.
*By 2017, computers will have become even more ubiquitous in the environment, largely owing to smaller size. Some will be woven into clothing and will be "self-organizing."
*By the same year, practical virtual reality glasses will be in use. The devices will work by beaming images directly onto the retinas of their users, creating large, three-dimensional floating images in the person's field of view. Such devices would provide a visual experience on par with a very large television, but would be highly portable, combining the best features of a portable video player and a widescreen TV. The glasses will deliver full-immersion virtual reality.
*By 2022, medical technology will be more than a thousand times more advanced than it is today, and the "tipping point" of human life expectancy will have been reached, with every new year of research guaranteeing at least one more year of life expectancy. Kurzweil also states that 3-4 months of life expectancy were added in 2007 due to the development of new medicines and treatments.
In a January 2017 blog article on his website, software developer Paul Feakins found that Kurzweil's analysis of his own prediction accuracy was heavily biased in his favour. Feakins rated Kurzweil's accuracy at closer to 36% on predictions that could be verified at that time.

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